Mother Jones launches new WordPress-based website-Mother Jones launches new WordPress-based website – “The magazine is like many that have decided to move to WordPress rather than an unwieldy CMS; another is Digital First Media, whose VIP content management system is also built off the platform” Read Full Article Related

What is Good Product Strategy?-“Product Strategy emerges from experimentation towards a goal. Initiatives around features, products, and platforms are proven this way. Those KPIs, OKRs, and other metrics you are setting for your teams are part of the Product Strategy. But, they cannot create a successful strategy on their own.” A very good read courtesy of UIE Related

Which is better, this or that? Improving the Color Contrast Ratio on Your Website-In a recent job interview, I was asked about designing for accessibility and how that would impact my design decisions. I replied at a minimum I’d use the following guidelines: Use alt tags with images Be aware of red/green color blindness issues And never (ever) use an image for a word on a page I then decided to put the my portfolio design through an accessibility audit using the Accessibility Developer Tools Chrome extension. To my dismay, the light blue color of my navigation bar caused an audit warning of “Text elements should have a reasonable contrast ratio”. This would …

Accident Tracking Application Workflow – Before and After-In an earlier post about observing and testing application workflows, I described the frustration of highly educated and tech savvy safety employees when the process for adding employee names to a accident report was confusing. In the original workflow, the employee look up for an incident required navigating to a new screen and clicking the hyperlinked employee name to add them to the incident. Our team documented the usability issues and I took the project from there by creating screen prototypes and conducting user acceptance testing. The result was an updated workflow including a pop up window where ALL employee names could be added to …

Observe and Test You Must!-In the UX Apprentice tutorial, there is a quote from a CNN Money article by the founder of Wesabe, Marc Hedlund, where he noted that “while I was focused on trying to make the usability of editing data as easy and functional as it could be; Mint was focused on making it so you never had to do that (editing data) at all. Their approach completely kicked our approach’s ass.” This story reminded me of my first User Experience project that involved complaints about an enterprise Accident Reporting application. This application met all the requirements of the Safety Department, had a …